


Remember Pearl Harbor; Purl Harder

by greenjudy



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Crochet hook save, Gen, Knitting, Scary adventures with sticks and string, Stress Relief, Team Bonding, except not, knitting commando
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-24
Updated: 2013-11-24
Packaged: 2018-01-02 12:06:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1056574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenjudy/pseuds/greenjudy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce sighed, and looked up at Tony. “Do you have a crochet hook?”</p><p>“A crochet hook?” </p><p>“Do you have,” Bruce asked with exaggerated patience, “a long, slender, hooked implement—“</p><p>Tony colored a little and looked away. </p><p>“You have a crochet hook, don’t you,” Natasha said. </p><p>--</p><p>Rated "teen" for some swearing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remember Pearl Harbor; Purl Harder

“Jesus.”

Clint, curled up on his end of the couch, glanced up from his StarkPad.

“I could’ve sworn you just swore,” he said. “What’ve you got?” 

“A problem,” Steve said from the other end of the couch. He pulled off his headphones, and held up his hands. “I think I have a problem.” 

Tony, entering the open-plan common area of the Stark Building’s brand-new Avengers Suite, did a spit-take. 

“What’s this now?”

“It’s a problem,” Steve said. 

Tony shook his head, awed. 

“That’s…that’s good. Bust those stereotypes wide open, fella.” 

“Which ones?” Natasha came out from behind the kitchen counter, shaking water off her hands. As she caught sight of what Steve was holding, she blinked.

Steve, hands still aloft, looked at her imploringly. 

“Do you, um, think you could—“ 

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said.

“But you—don’t you—didn’t you learn, I thought women—“ 

Natasha lifted her left eyebrow, and he paused.

“No?” he asked meekly.

“No,” she said, and went back into the kitchen. 

Tony, holding a large bowl filled entirely and solely with red and yellow M&Ms, walked a slow circle around the couch. 

“You’re knitting,” he pronounced. 

Steve looked a little ruffled. 

“Yes, I’m knitting,” he said. 

“I noticed that before,” Clint said. “I just, you know, didn’t say anything.” 

“Motherfucker,” Tony said. “So where’d you pick this up? USO girls, or…?”

“Station hospital in Tuscany,” Steve said. 

“Hot knitting nurses?” Clint asked.

“Wounded soldiers. They actually did a lot of knitting,” Steve explained. Tony looked quizzical for a second, and then his face cleared.

“Oh, sure, put those guys to work making socks and stuff for the front? Because you couldn’t just let them convalesce or anything…”

“Hard to imagine,” Clint said, “you staying in a hospital bed long enough to learn.”

“It was for morale,” Steve said. “Some of the young guys felt…”

“Emasculated?” Natasha asked from the kitchen.

“You’re injured, stuck in bed. Feeling useless. Your head goes round and round. Knitting helped. I mean it didn’t just help the war effort. Knitting actually really helped. Good for coordination, for concentration, for a lot of things. Seemed to speed healing. But you had to get over the idea—“

“That you were a girly man freak?” Tony asked. 

“That you weren’t a soldier anymore,” Steve said quietly. “So I learned. For a while there, I visited a lot of hospitals in the Mediterranean and then in the European Theatre. I talked to a lot of guys. Captain America knows how to knit? I think that helped a few of those guys feel better. And I got pretty good at socks.”

“Good on you, Cap,” Tony said. “I dig it, you lobbed one at heteronormativity, that’s awesome. Knitting in the Avengers Suite. I’m all for it.” He cracked his neck. “So what’s your problem here? I’m an engineer. I like problems.”

“I’m not an engineer,” Steve said. “I’m a sock knitter. You know? Knit, purl, increase, decrease. This—this is not a sock.” He jammed the stitches down the circular needle and tossed the snarl of pewter-colored yarn onto the coffee table. 

“Looks okay,” Tony said. “Oh. Wait. Not okay.” 

“Aw, knitting, no,” Clint said. 

\--

 

“I think it deserves a decent burial,” Clint said. “It was almost incredibly cool.” 

“I’m not—I feel bad enough about this—forty hours of my life—“

“Seriously?” Natasha asked.

“Or a Viking funeral,” Clint said. “Maybe Thor could help us put it on a boat and set it on fire.” 

“Wait, don’t—don’t burn any boats,” Bruce said from the doorway. 

“How long have you been there?” Natasha asked.

“I can’t believe you just asked me that question,” Bruce said. 

“Captain America knits,” she said. “Paradigm shift. It’s distracting.”

Bruce crossed the room, hand extended cautiously. 

“Steve, don’t do anything rash, OK? Let me—just let me see it.”

“What are you, a knitting EMT?” Tony asked.

Bruce reached out and pulled the delicate tangle open on the table. 

“Jesus,” he said. 

“It’s for Peggy,” Steve said helplessly. “It was supposed to be a scarf.” 

“A lace scarf, knit…” Bruce turned the fabric over, “on both sides. Yep. True knitted lace. What is this, merino single?” 

Steve gave him a blank look. 

“Kettle-dyed merino wool,” Bruce decided. “Really nice colorway. I like the way it changes. You’d think it’d overwhelm the pattern, but it really doesn’t. What happened here?”

“It was going so well.”

“Yeah,” Clint said. “Stick and string malfunctions tend to start off like that…”

“The pattern wasn’t that—so I started, well, I started listening to _The Winds of War_ while I was working on it.” 

“Herman Wouk?” Bruce asked. “I’ve read it. Yeah, he’s kind of easy to get lost in.”

“Saw the miniseries,” Clint said. “Does that count?”

“I guess it got away from me. I realized I had an extra stitch…”

“That is never good,” Clint said.

“It was lucky I caught it when I did. So I tinked…”

“I’m gonna bill you if you tinked on the couch, Rogers,” Tony said.

There was a brief, significant silence.

“So I tinked,” Steve said again, “back to the marker, but when you’re tinkin’ these decrease stitches that are made out of yarnovers…I got kind of confused, and—“ 

Bruce gently smoothed out the scarf. 

“It’s an ingenious pattern,” he said. “It’ll be beautiful when it’s done.” 

“I’m not sure it’ll get done,” Steve said morosely. “I can’t—there’s just all these yarnovers everywhere.”

“You’re right,” Bruce said. “It’s not like plain knitting, where you can _see_ the dropped stitch falling down through the work. It’s going to get a little tricky.”

“Tricky? This—this is just a morass of holes. I don’t even know where the stitches went.” 

Bruce pushed his glasses back up onto his nose, and dropped down onto the couch next to Steve. He gestured at the knitting. 

“Uh—may I—“ 

Steve made a go-right-ahead movement with his hands, and Bruce gathered the yarn-tangle into his lap, bringing the circular needle up to his face. 

“Is it doomed?” Natasha asked. 

Bruce was silent for a while, thick fingers slipping stitches along the needle. 

“Steve,” he said finally, “do you know how to read your work?” 

“Bruce,” Steve said, “I don’t even know what reading my work means.” 

“A lot of knitters don’t know how. It’s okay. Lot of guys in the field know how to follow orders, right?”

“Sure,” Steve said.

“But you aren’t doing that, just following orders. Not when you’re out there. You see the patterns, you understand the movements, you know where the guys have to go and you send them there.”

“Sure,” Steve said again. “Would have been a pretty awful CO if I hadn’t.” 

“Well, you know how to read your work,” Bruce said. “Look. Don’t worry about the pattern notes. Just look at how this lace pattern got made. Repeats are just three stitches long, alternating here, and here. You come back here and you’re absolutely right, the stitches you’re looking for are missing, and it throws the whole pattern off. You must have dropped a couple when you were backtracking. So we need to recreate the stitches you dropped, here, here, and here. We’ll need a crochet hook.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve said. 

Bruce smiled a tiny smile. 

“You knit commando, huh? There aren’t even lifelines in this. Were all your socks perfect or something?”

“Socks are simple,” Steve said. “If there’s a hole, you made a mistake. You pull it all out and do it again, this time without holes.” 

Bruce sighed, and looked up at Tony. “Do you have a crochet hook?”

“A crochet hook?” 

“Do you have,” Bruce asked with exaggerated patience, “a long, slender, hooked implement—“

Tony colored a little and looked away. 

“You have a crochet hook, don’t you,” Natasha said. 

\--

“It’s really handy for fishing wires up out of housings, okay,” Tony explained to Thor, who had followed him back upstairs. “The needlenose pliers were—I couldn’t weasel them down far enough, so—“ 

“Thanks,” Bruce said, taking the crochet hook. “Steve, have a look.” 

Thor, leaning over the couch to see, uttered a cry of surprise. 

“This is very fine work,” he said to Bruce. “You wrought all this with but a single flexible pin?” 

“It’s Steve’s, actually.” 

Thor gazed at Steve with new respect. 

“Yeah, he wrought it,” Tony said. “Apparently, he, uh, wrights shit like this all the time.” 

“We just have a few stitches that partied a little too hard,” Bruce said. He slipped the hook down through the threads. “Come on now, nice and easy,” he murmured. “Come on, vacation’s over, let’s go back to work. See? You bring this one back up through this one like this.” With a little twist he brought up a loop of yarn and put it on the needle. 

“That stitch came from nowhere,” Steve said. 

“No, I retrieved it, actually.” 

“I do not see whence it came, either,” Thor said, with the air of a person observing a surgical procedure. 

“That’s okay,” Bruce said. “I’ll do it again. Here we go. The way this yarn’s been dyed makes it easy to see—“ 

“Th—there?” 

“Yeah, there he is. Here, you pick him up.” Bruce handed the crochet needle to Steve. 

“Uh…”

“Deep breaths,” Bruce said, his face serious. “Deep breaths now.” 

Steve, moving as if he were defusing a bomb, plucked at the threads. 

“Not that one,” Bruce said quietly. “The other one. See? Follow the color change.” 

“Ah—argh—over or under here—“ 

“Just pull it through.” 

“Ah!” Thor whispered. “Cleverly done!” 

Natasha, watching closely, tilted her head to one side.

“Nice wrist work,” she told Steve. “I could see broad applications for that.”

“Jesus,” Steve said, and breathed heavily through his nose.

“Um, are you okay? I’m not seeing the therapeutic dimension of this activity,” Natasha said.

“Good work,” Bruce said. “Can you get the last one?” 

“I think so,” Steve said. His voice was a little shaky, but his expression showed dawning hope. “I think I’m getting the sense of where these guys go when they get dropped. They sort of fall into the strands that make up the holes—“ and he carefully brought up another stitch. 

“No knitting has to die today,” Clint said. 

\--

“Are we back in the pattern flow, now?” Bruce asked, a few minutes later. 

“One second,” Steve mumbled. “Let me finish this row.” 

“How did you become a knitting Jedi, anyway?” Clint asked Bruce. 

Bruce lifted one shoulder, let it fall. 

“YouTube,” he said. 

“What… _what?”_

“I spend a lot of time by myself,” Bruce explained. 

With a deep sigh, Steve set the scarf on the coffee table and rolled his shoulders. 

“Wow,” he said. “I think I lost ten years of my life.” 

“Here,” Bruce said. “Let’s see what it’ll look like.” He gestured to Clint. “Hold this, okay? Try to keep the tension even.” 

Clint obligingly held down the top edge of the scarf, as Bruce gently stretched it out over the coffee table. 

“When this blocks,” Bruce said, “it’ll be stunning.” 

Clint whistled.

“The lady,” Thor said, “will treasure this.” 

“Holy shit,” Tony said. “I thought it was a mutant yarn tangle. It’s actually a thing.” 

“I’d wear that,” Natasha said.

 _”I’d_ wear that,” Clint said. “Maybe not on maneuvers.” 

“It would be very fetching on you, Hawk,” said Tony. 

Steve looked up at Bruce. 

“Thanks,” he said. “Honestly, thank you. I was getting pretty frustrated.” 

“Knitting,” Bruce said, “is pretty frustrating. But every time I, you know, make it to the end of a row, it’s like one more piece of sanity.” 

The Avengers lounge was very quiet for a second or two. 

“Um, whoa?” Clint said.

“In that case,” Thor said, “I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to this craft.” 

“Keep knitting, Bruce, okay?” Natasha said.

**Author's Note:**

> I am by no means an accomplished knitter (a lot more like Steve than Bruce, but I don't even do socks); please forgive any errors, perplexities, or confusion both in the story you've just read, and in the following definitions. 
> 
> A lot of basic knitting deploys just two stitches: knit and purl. To get the usual "knitted" fabric effect (aka stockinette), one side is knitted, and the other side is purled (the yarn is wrapped around the needle in a different way, producing a differently shaped stitch). Knitted fabric can be shaped by increasing and decreasing the number of stitches in a row (maneuvers like this let you wrap knitted fabric around things like feet quite nicely). 
> 
> "Tinking" is essentially undoing your stitches ("tink" is "knit" spelled backwards). I think this must be anachronistic vocabulary for a knitter of Steve's era, but I could not resist.
> 
> A yarn over is a knitting maneuver that effectively makes a small hole in your knitting. Lace patterns make extensive use of yarn overs (which generate new stitches) and decrease stitches (in which two or more stitches are knit into at the same time, effectively merging the stitches) to produce patterns both simple and intricate. 
> 
> Some lace knitting only does fancy stitches on one side of the fabric. Steve is not so sensible as that; his pattern has yarn overs and decreases on both sides. He has also eschewed the use of a lifeline, which is a fine piece of string or thread or yarn (in a color that contrasts with the knitting) that you sneak through your stitches in case of emergencies. If all goes wrong, you can unravel back to the lifeline. I guess Steve, as befits a Howling Commando, likes to work without a net. 
> 
> For you knitters out there, his pattern is rectangular but was inspired by Jared Flood's "Rock Island" (he came to grief in the "rock island" section on one or two of the S1K2TOGPSSOs). Lo! 
> 
> [Rock Island](http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/rock-island)
> 
>    
> The title is inspired by a WWII-era poster meant to encourage the knitters on the home front--produced in 1942 by (wait for it) the New York City WPA War Service. Yep: Steve's old employer. 
> 
> [Remember Pearl Harbor](http://americanhistory.si.edu/victory/903535a.gif)
> 
>  
> 
> Finally, this piece owes its life to the splendid [teaberryblue](http://archiveofourown.org/users/teaberryblue/profile), who kindly beta'd and encouraged me and also suggested that Tony's M&M's would be exclusively red and yellow.
> 
> News Flash: Please see [Pattern Recognition](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1058573) by [QueenBee4Ever](http://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenBee4Ever/profile) for a moving meditation on why Tony might have had that crochet hook. QB, I am very honored.
> 
> ILLUSTRATION! This is by the inimitable [teaberryblue](http://archiveofourown.org/users/teaberryblue/profile), for a birthday present! Thanks so much, Tea! 
> 
>  
> 
> [](http://s181.photobucket.com/user/zia_narratora/media/1796%20Broadway/greenjudybday.png.html)  
> 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Pattern Recognition](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1058573) by [QueenBee4Ever](https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenBee4Ever/pseuds/QueenBee4Ever)




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